by Paul Theroux
It was not that he didn’t read. He enjoyed history, especially local history—of Boston, New England, his ancestral province of Quebec. The Lewis and Clark Expedition fascinated him to the point where he would declaim the hardships the team faced, with the stout-hearted Sacagawea, the bad weather, the plagues of wasps. (“They were taw-mented!” Floyd would cry, wagging his finger, imitating Dad’s characteristic way of speaking.) He read everything he could find on the assassination of Lincoln and had a detailed knowledge of the conspirators. He got the newspaper every day and read his holy missal the way a Muslim reads the Koran—and his missal had the thickened and thumbed look of a Wahhabi’s Koran. He read about whaling and could tell you what flensing was and the composition of baleen, about Gloucester fishermen, the Battle of Lexington, the works of Edward Rowe Snow—all of that, but no work of mine.
At first I was bewildered, then relieved, and finally I was indifferent. Father did not read novels—anyone’s novels, at least not modern ones. And I had not become a writer to please my parents, only myself. A writer is rarely able to do both, and I know that, far from wishing to please them, I wrote as an act of rebellion.
It took me years to understand how hostile a family could be to a writer in their midst. Mother was the most vocal. Appalled, she could sound like a Soviet censor in the way she denounced me. She tore at my writing, her fingers working like scissors when she found it. She bleated when she heard the clack and rattle of the Remington. “Stop making all that noise!” she had cried. “My nerves are shot!” She stood hovering where I sat, disapproving of my very posture, my back hunched, seeming to cower submissively. So I stopped pounding the Remington and used a pencil, silently scratching on paper, but doing that, a few lines at a time, seemed to Mother like even greater idleness than typing.
“You’re going to ruin your eyes,” Dad said.
“Would you show this to Father Furty?” Mother said as she tore up a poem or a page from a story, a secret agony committed to paper.
Years later, I understood the secret scribblers in the gulags, the dissident hiding his diary, the smuggled stub of a pencil.
Mother wanted to send me out of the house to a real job with a weekly salary, to a man who would pay me and thank her for handing me over to him. She did not really know the world of employment. In that world she was a confused peasant, twisting her shawl in her fingers, in the way she magnified the big unseen outer world of business and the powerful people who ran it. You could not impress these people of power with any writing; you had to respect them. If you did, they’d treat you right. They laughed at books, they worshiped money, they demanded work. You had to sweat for them, stocking shelves or mopping floors. You didn’t need imagination, you needed gumption, and no jokes. “Elbow grease! Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty! Roll up your sleeves!” All this time I was reading Henry Miller. Writing about Rimbaud, Miller said, “My natural temperament was that of a kind, joyous, open-hearted individual—as a youngster I was often referred to as ‘an angel.’ But the demon of revolt had taken possession of me at a very early age. It was my mother who implanted it in me. It was against her, against all that she represented, that I directed my uncontrollable energy.”
Somewhere Miller had written that his mother told his third wife, Lepska, that she had never read anything he’d published, yet still she disparaged his writing. He often dreamed about an ideal mother. “It occurred to me that if my mother had been like the mother I dreamed about, perhaps I wouldn’t have become a writer after all,” Miller said. “I might have become a tailor like my father.”
As for my mother, the rule was: Be small, work hard, shut your mouth, learn the value of a dollar, show some respect, get a haircut, don’t waste your time with poems, don’t be a sissy, hustle while you wait. Reading might be fine for some, but it was a luxury. Reading didn’t put food on the table.
Who was Mother? In all this, Mother was my muse.
PART FOUR
47
Pastoral
A small voice fluttering like a moth trapped in the wall was calling “Mama” with each push of its papery wings. I woke and lay listening for the cry to be answered and the frail-sounding thing to be stilled. I was in darkness, in a small room in an unfamiliar bed, a sweet-sour smell in the warm air of damp dirt and woodsmoke, of a smothered fire, of crushed flowers. A window shape squeezed to a trapezoid of sharp-edged moonlight flat on the floor lit the room, so I didn’t need to switch on my phone, as I usually did to illuminate my way. I got up, unbolted the wooden plank door, and went outside, barefoot, in my pajama bottoms, the gasp “Mama” still pulsing behind the plaster. I knew I wasn’t home.
The whole steep river valley and the bulge of mountains clawed by erosion behind it were silvered by the moon. Even the pebbles and smooth boulders near my feet were gem-like, carbuncular in moonglow, the forest in the middle distance a puddle of blue from the milky lunar drip of moon over its bunches of leaves and dense foliage. All of it stillness and silence except for a distant and bewildered dog yap. I seemed to lie against the bosom of the world, the tickle of dust, the softness of light, the tender earth underfoot.
The call “Mama” came pattering again, hoarsely now like the scrape of dead leaves, and then the mother’s murmur of consolation, a whispered reassurance that moved me—the mother so patient and responsive, surrendering, clucking to the child. A sigh of satisfaction became a soft cooing, and then silence.
I’d been woken in my dream, a recurring one, pleasurable in its harmless oddity. I’d just been released from prison and been given a brown paper bag of my possessions and an envelope of money. I was waiting at a bus stop alone on a hot street. Not an anxiety dream, but a dream of purity and simplicity: an outlaw reborn as a citizen—exhilarated, solitary, and anonymous, the bus slowing down, its brakes snorting, to take me away, to begin again in a distant place, with a new name. My B. Traven dream of escape.
Another whiff in the night air, of roasted meat and burned beans, kerosene fumes and damp plaster. And a sharp chalky odor suggested by what I’d seen the day before on the valley floor, the scattered bones, the sun-bleached cow skull, the toothy jawbone, the splintered ribs—maybe goats, maybe mules—white bones crumbled in the dry soil like broken coral on a tropical beach.
My job—my unfinished magazine article—rattled in my head. Usually it was only when I finished a piece that I was calmed, but I was calm now, even with my work incomplete.
Then I remembered I was in a village in Mexico, and recalled the stages by which I’d gotten here, tumbling through the country to come to rest in this hut, feeling at peace.
In the early, searching part of my life, as a teacher in Africa and Southeast Asia, when I read everything, including the small print on the labels of ketchup bottles, I’d happened upon The Death Ship and discovered a writer to my taste. B. Traven was a rebel, a wanderer, a bitter satirist, an underdogger—and a mystery. After that book, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Cotton Pickers, short stories, and the sequence of six novels of rebellion, the “Jungle Novels,” about turmoil in the southern state of Chiapas. The mystery was that though they were written by B. Traven, no one knew who he was; no one had ever seen him. He seemed to be a man with at least four other names and no final identity, who had rejected his family and his birth name and exiled himself to Mexico, where he lived with a much younger Mexican woman, who guarded his privacy.
But I felt I knew him. Read enough of the same writer and you develop an intimacy with the person on the page—his moods, his preferences, his tastes in politics and romance, his views on family and friendship, his pleasure in weather and food and the use of certain words. I came to know aspects of B. Traven—the important ones—and formed the portrait of a traveler, an outsider in Mexico, a revolutionary, a bit of an outlaw. As a younger writer I had found him a compelling figure who’d lived a life I aspired to, as a fulfilled loner.
No one had ever knowingly interviewed him. To the people who believed they�
��d met him, he claimed to be Traven’s literary agent, Hal Croves. And he was two or three other shadowy people, each with a distinct name, none with a verifiable past. But this crowd of aliases was a dodge. His books were the work of one man, and as he wrote in one of them, “The creative person should have no other biography than his work.”
Amen, Mother.
Hidden, productive, loved; living in Mexico, a restless man, a linguist, a photographer, an occasional explorer in the jungle—sought out but never found—he had always been a hero to me, especially now, as I reflected that I was living at home near my mother and among my contentious family, deeply in debt, pitied by my children, unregarded, unproductive, unloved.
So when a magazine editor asked me to write a travel piece—the sort of thing I did to pay bills—I suggested as a subject “B. Traven’s Mexico.” Much of the mystery of Traven’s identity had been solved by a British writer in the 1980s, yet that book, and the man himself, were no longer news.
“Name rings a bell,” my editor said, as people do when they haven’t the slightest idea and don’t want to seem stupid. I explained, with a few titles, and he said, “Oh, I adore that movie. I’m a total Bogart freak. ‘We don’t need no stinkin’ badges’”—and bought the concept. It had everything: coastal Tampico, upscale Mexico City, distant Chiapas, quotes from the books, a then-and-now angle, an atmosphere of the bygone and the boutique, with a glow of nostalgia.
“Maybe work ‘Sierra Madre’ into the title—what’s that, ‘Mountains of Mother’? I love it.”
“Could refer to Mother of God in this case.”
“Good point. And Jay?”
“Yes?”
“Find some great little restaurants and some shopping tips for the sidebar. Bijoux hotels, maybe a spa experience.”
Now I was near remote Ocosingo, watched by three young boys as I crouched by the bank of the Río Jataté in midafternoon heat and long black shadows, an odor of marsh blossoms and stagnation like an old foul stew, in the hot silence and a buzzing of sawflies. And the memory of “maybe a spa experience” made me smile.
The plop of footsteps in the mud of the foreshore. I looked behind me—a young woman, black hair, white blouse, long skirt, bare feet.
“Comida para Usted, señor,” she said. Her skirt reached to her ankles, her blouse was untucked, her breasts filling it. This was only the second time I’d seen her—I’d arrived the day before—and she was shy but curious in the country way, averting her gaze as she added, “De mi madre.”
“Que es eso?”
“Tamale.” She spoke in a soft querying voice, presenting the parcel wrapped in banana leaves, using both her hands, out of respect.
“Tamale chiapaneca,” a squatting boy said.
“Cual es su nombre, señorita?”
She lowered her eyes, because I had gotten to my feet and walked up to her to accept the tamale, perhaps too close. Her hands flew to her face. She peered at me between her slender fingers.
“Luma,” she whispered, holding the word in her mouth out of shyness.
“Thank you, Luma,” I said in English, and she laughed in confusion, then tugged at her skirt and stepped away, taking the path through the marsh grass to the slope that led to the house.
After she’d gone, the three boys I’d been talking to began to laugh. The one who called himself Nelson was standing on the flat sloping stone that served as a boat slipway. Álvaro was sitting in the boat that was tilted against the stone, ready to be launched. And Jorge, the smallest, was scrubbing the gunwales with a rag. They were her younger brothers.
“Ciguena likes you,” Nelson said in Spanish.
“Why do you call her that?” It was the word for stork.
“Her legs. Her way of standing and —” He broke off and laughed with the others.
“How do you know she likes me?”
“Because you have what she wants.”
“Money,” I said.
“And also money,” Álvaro said.
The others hooted, believing he’d made a subtle joke.
“You are a man,” Nelson said.
“So are you.”
“She is our sister!” Nelson pretended to be shocked.
I leaned toward him and said, “Soy un hombre viejo.”
“Un gringo viejo es bueno,” Nelson said. “Lo tienes todo.”
“I don’t have everything.”
“Sí, todo—pero no Ciguena,” Álvaro said.
“Take her and live with us here,” Nelson said. “Mother will make food. Ciguena will have your children. We will be happy.”
“Aren’t you happy now?”
“Yes. But we will be more happy with the gringo in the house.”
Idle village talk from teasing boys, so I said, “Su marido.”
Nelson, the shrewdest one, shook his head. Even he could see that “husband” was absurd. Making a fine distinction in what my status would be, he said, “Nuestro padrino.”
Not her husband, but their godfather. I unwrapped the banana leaf and offered pieces of the tamale to them. They accepted a small piece each and ate, nibbling, as hungry people did in those parts, making it last, chewing slowly.
“Will you read to us tonight again?”
“Yes. Of course.”
“About the bones?”
“Why not?” Then I remembered. “I heard a baby crying early this morning. A little baby.”
“Ciguena’s boy—a few months old.”
Now I knew why they called her the stork, but why were they teasing me about wooing her?
My travel for the B. Traven magazine piece had brought me here. Tampico had been a bust—an ugly harbor city of oil depots; Mexico City was vast, polluted, chaotic, and traffic-ridden. I did what Traven would have done, fled south to Chiapas in a rental car, first to the old mountain town of San Cristóbal de las Casas, then more easterly still to Ocosingo, and finally here to the edge of the Lacandon Jungle, which Traven explored in the 1920s and used as the setting for his novels of rebellion. Traven’s funeral had been held in Ocosingo, his ashes scattered in the Río Jataté, where I was now living with the Trinidad family: the grandmother, Abuela; her daughter, Rosa, the madre; and Luma, apparently unmarried but with a small baby. A house of mothers.
I had found them by chance, near the village of La Soledad, as I’d driven on the road that ran parallel to the river. Seeing a well-built house and a woman in the yard hanging clothes on a line, I’d stopped to ask for directions the day before. “Directions” was my ploy to engage the woman and talk in general about security on this country road. Some people in Ocosingo had warned me of the rebel group who called themselves Zapatistas and were active in parts of the state and generally hostile to foreigners. Traven would have loved them for their anticapitalism, their indigenous roots, and their subversion.
Seeing me parking my car, the woman approached, a wet towel draped on her arm. She greeted me, we spoke for a while—pleasantries—and then she said, “What is it you are looking for on this road?”
“For a place to stay. For food. For people to talk to.” As I spoke, she began to smile. I added, “Tranquilidad.”
She straightened and threw her head back, a haughty and assured gesture that seemed consciously theatrical. “Then you have arrived. You can find a bed here. And food, and people who will tell you what you want to know.”
Plucking at the towel on her arm, she stared at me with kindly eyes for a response. She was an older woman, looking sixty or so, but probably much younger, in a blue smock. Her black hair was tightened on her skull, drawn back in a single braid. Her neatness and self-assurance gave me confidence. Behind her a very old woman sat rigid, knees together, in a chair on the veranda. The house was also reassuring, one story high, of plaster and brick, with a flat roof bordered by a low parapet of fanciful crenellations, very solid and plump, like a little citadel between the road and the river. The river valley beyond was the backdrop; there were no other houses nearby.
&nbs
p; “I will think about it,” I said.
“While you are thinking, please sit down,” and she indicated a chair near the old woman. “I will bring you some food.” She called out “I am Rosa” as she entered the house.
I was taken by her directness and familiarity. I said hello to the old woman and sat down. The old woman mumbled a greeting but seemed distracted, and when she turned to me she did not look at my face but rather to the side of me and beyond. Her eyes were clouded—wide open and glistening—and I realized that she might be blind. For a long while she was silent, taking no notice of me. Was she blind? What threw me was that at her elbow there was a book. I tilted my head and saw on the spine that it was a Bible.
“La Santa Biblia,” I said.
She nodded and gave a little grunt.
“I am an American. United States. I am a stranger.”
The old woman smiled and tapped her fingers on the arm of her chair, her hand very slender with yellow fingernails. She seemed to repeat what I had said and added more, just as Rosa returned with a tin tray, a thick white plate of food on it—a tamale, some corn on the cob, a tumbler of milky coffee—and placed it on the table next to me.
“My mother is saying you are not a stranger. You are with our family.”
“Thank you,” I said. “This food”—I chewed and swallowed—“very tasty!”
“To help you think,” Rosa said, and sat below me on the veranda steps while I ate.
“My mother is alive,” I said, wondering at my boasting. “She is over one hundred years old.”
“Dios la bendiga,” Rosa said. “You are very lucky. You will live a long time.”
“So will you. Your mother is also old.”
“She is more than seventy years.”